Using PHP5-FPM With Apache2 On CentOS 6.2

Version 1.0
Author: Falko Timme <ft [at] falkotimme [dot] com>
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Last edited 02/20/2012

This tutorial shows how you can install an Apache2 webserver on a CentOS 6.2 server with PHP5 (through PHP-FPM) and MySQL support. PHP-FPM (FastCGI Process Manager) is an alternative PHP FastCGI implementation with some additional features useful for sites of any size, especially busier sites.

I do not issue any guarantee that this will work for you!

1 Preliminary Note

In this tutorial I use the hostname server1.example.com with the IP address 192.168.0.100. These settings might differ for you, so you have to replace them where appropriate.

2 Enabling Additional Repositories

We need to install mod_fastcgi later on which is available in the RPMforge repositories. RPMforge can be enabled as follows:

rpm --import http://dag.wieers.com/rpm/packages/RPM-GPG-KEY.dag.txt

cd /tmp
wget http://pkgs.repoforge.org/rpmforge-release/rpmforge-release-0.5.2-2.el6.rf.x86_64.rpm
rpm -ivh rpmforge-release-0.5.2-2.el6.rf.x86_64.rpm

php-fpm is not available from the official CentOS repositories, but from the Remi RPM repository which itself depends on the EPEL repository; we can enable both repositories as follows:

rpm --import https://fedoraproject.org/static/0608B895.txt
rpm -ivh http://dl.fedoraproject.org/pub/epel/6/x86_64/epel-release-6-5.noarch.rpm

rpm --import http://rpms.famillecollet.com/RPM-GPG-KEY-remi
rpm -ivh http://rpms.famillecollet.com/enterprise/remi-release-6.rpm

yum install yum-priorities

Edit /etc/yum.repos.d/epel.repo...

vi /etc/yum.repos.d/epel.repo

... and add the line priority=10 to the [epel] section:

[epel]
name=Extra Packages for Enterprise Linux 6 - $basearch
#baseurl=http://download.fedoraproject.org/pub/epel/6/$basearch
mirrorlist=https://mirrors.fedoraproject.org/metalink?repo=epel-6&arch=$basearch
failovermethod=priority
enabled=1
priority=10
gpgcheck=1
gpgkey=file:///etc/pki/rpm-gpg/RPM-GPG-KEY-EPEL-6
[...]

Then do the same for the [remi] section in /etc/yum.repos.d/remi.repo, plus change enabled to 1:

vi /etc/yum.repos.d/remi.repo

[remi]
name=Les RPM de remi pour Enterprise Linux $releasever - $basearch
#baseurl=http://rpms.famillecollet.com/enterprise/$releasever/remi/$basearch/
mirrorlist=http://rpms.famillecollet.com/enterprise/$releasever/remi/mirror
enabled=1
priority=10
gpgcheck=1
gpgkey=file:///etc/pki/rpm-gpg/RPM-GPG-KEY-remi
failovermethod=priority

[remi-test]
name=Les RPM de remi en test pour Enterprise Linux $releasever - $basearch
#baseurl=http://rpms.famillecollet.com/enterprise/$releasever/test/$basearch/
mirrorlist=http://rpms.famillecollet.com/enterprise/$releasever/test/mirror
enabled=0
gpgcheck=1
gpgkey=file:///etc/pki/rpm-gpg/RPM-GPG-KEY-remi

3 Installing MySQL 5

To install MySQL, we do this:

yum install mysql mysql-server

Then we create the system startup links for MySQL (so that MySQL starts automatically whenever the system boots) and start the MySQL server:

chkconfig --levels 235 mysqld on
/etc/init.d/mysqld start

Set passwords for the MySQL root account:

mysql_secure_installation

[root@server1 ~]# mysql_secure_installation




NOTE: RUNNING ALL PARTS OF THIS SCRIPT IS RECOMMENDED FOR ALL MySQL
      SERVERS IN PRODUCTION USE!  PLEASE READ EACH STEP CAREFULLY!


In order to log into MySQL to secure it, we'll need the current
password for the root user.  If you've just installed MySQL, and
you haven't set the root password yet, the password will be blank,
so you should just press enter here.

Enter current password for root (enter for none):
OK, successfully used password, moving on...

Setting the root password ensures that nobody can log into the MySQL
root user without the proper authorisation.

Set root password? [Y/n] <-- ENTER
New password: <-- yourrootsqlpassword
Re-enter new password: <-- yourrootsqlpassword
Password updated successfully!
Reloading privilege tables..
 ... Success!


By default, a MySQL installation has an anonymous user, allowing anyone
to log into MySQL without having to have a user account created for
them.  This is intended only for testing, and to make the installation
go a bit smoother.  You should remove them before moving into a
production environment.

Remove anonymous users? [Y/n] <-- ENTER
 ... Success!

Normally, root should only be allowed to connect from 'localhost'.  This
ensures that someone cannot guess at the root password from the network.

Disallow root login remotely? [Y/n] <-- ENTER
 ... Success!

By default, MySQL comes with a database named 'test' that anyone can
access.  This is also intended only for testing, and should be removed
before moving into a production environment.

Remove test database and access to it? [Y/n] <-- ENTER
 - Dropping test database...
 ... Success!
 - Removing privileges on test database...
 ... Success!

Reloading the privilege tables will ensure that all changes made so far
will take effect immediately.

Reload privilege tables now? [Y/n] <-- ENTER
 ... Success!

Cleaning up...



All done!  If you've completed all of the above steps, your MySQL
installation should now be secure.

Thanks for using MySQL!


[root@server1 ~]#

4 Installing Apache2

Apache2 is available as a CentOS package, therefore we can install it like this:

yum install httpd

Now configure your system to start Apache at boot time...

chkconfig --levels 235 httpd on

... and start Apache:

/etc/init.d/httpd start

Now direct your browser to http://192.168.0.100, and you should see the Apache2 placeholder page:

Apache's default document root is /var/www/html on CentOS, and the configuration file is /etc/httpd/conf/httpd.conf. Additional configurations are stored in the /etc/httpd/conf.d/ directory.

5 Installing PHP5

We can make PHP5 work in Apache2 through PHP-FPM and Apache's mod_fastcgi module which we install as follows:

yum install mod_fastcgi php-fpm

Then open /etc/php.ini:

vi /etc/php.ini

In order to avoid errors like

[08-Aug-2011 18:07:08] PHP Warning: phpinfo(): It is not safe to rely on the system's timezone settings. You are *required* to use the date.timezone setting or the date_default_timezone_set() function. In case you used any of those methods and you are still getting this warning, you most likely misspelled the timezone identifier. We selected 'Europe/Berlin' for 'CEST/2.0/DST' instead in /usr/share/nginx/html/info.php on line 2

... in /var/log/php-fpm/www-error.log when you call a PHP script in your browser, you should set date.timezone in /etc/php.ini:

[...]
[Date]
; Defines the default timezone used by the date functions
; http://www.php.net/manual/en/datetime.configuration.php#ini.date.timezone
date.timezone = "Europe/Berlin"
[...]

You can find out the correct timezone for your system by running:

cat /etc/sysconfig/clock

[root@server1 nginx]# cat /etc/sysconfig/clock
ZONE="Europe/Berlin"
[root@server1 nginx]#

Next create the system startup links for php-fpm and start it:

chkconfig --levels 235 php-fpm on
/etc/init.d/php-fpm start

PHP-FPM is a daemon process (with the init script /etc/init.d/php-fpm) that runs a FastCGI server on port 9000.

Next restart Apache:

/etc/init.d/httpd restart